In the future, to pass college you no longer must pass written finals. Instead, you are simply dropped into a real life scenario related to your major, and left to fend for yourself with your new found knowledge.

I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t studying to be a doctor, after all. I didn’t get a degree in Emergency Management. I was an engineer. How bad could this be? I stepped up to the chair, and seated myself, as the doctor droned on.

“As part of your graduation exam, you will be placed in a real-life scenario requiring the use of your skills. To do this, you will be transited to an alternate universe briefly. Be advised that there will be consequences to your activities there. Your placement will branch into a new parallel universe, and the people there will go forward dealing with the consequences of your performance. Do you understand?”

The doctor paused for a precise moment, then began speaking again. He’d given this speech a lot, it seemed. “While there, you may be exposed to stressful events. Be advised that any extremes of stress that may threaten your health will return you from your presence there, and a re-examination will be required. You will not . . . .”

He droned on, and on. I had stopped listening at this point, waiting for it to be over so I could build a clock or repair a generator, or maybe design some primitive waterwheel. The doctor cleared his throat. I looked up, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. Could you repeat the last sentence?”

“Do you agree to the terms and conditions as detailed?” His eyes fixed on me, disapproving. He knew I hadn’t listened to a word.

“This way.” She led me into the parking area, to her car. I watched the scenery as we drove, passing the Pentagon, then the Potomac passing by. Through a jungle of office buildings, into a neighborhood full of green grass and trees, scattered with old brick apartment buildings.

I ran my fingers through green leaves as we went to the apartment building. I was used to cities being an ocean of pavement. She opened the door, leading me into a small apartment. “So let’s not waste time taking coats and making tea. Where is he?”

A voice called from the next room. “I’m in here . . . I’d recognize that ego anywhere.” I followed the sound, pushing the door open. “Christopher . . . you made it. The Good Doctor himself.”

I smiled, struggling to show no response. This was a man with unbreachable skin, limitless strength, a man who had incredible grace, honed from a lifetime of struggling not to crush everything he picked up. And he was lying there like a dead fish, weak as a child. A pot sat by his bed, ready to be puked in, I guessed. “I was told it was poison . . . may I?”

He nodded, and his weakness worried me. I pulled the gloves off my hands and examined my senses. I could feel the spread of my bones and veins and nerves like most people could feel the positions of their limbs, and as I touched John’s arm, I felt his body too, as if it were an extension of mine. Every cell, the intricate web combining to form a human being . . . and a lot of tainted blood.

In processes that defied biology or chemistry, I coaxed the tainted cells down his arm. I instructed his skin to part at his wrist, and picked up the pot, holding it under his arm to catch the corrupted fluid. “Ow.” He squirmed, though the cut I’d opened was small. “Shit. What are you doing?”

“I told your body to bleed. God, you’re such a baby. You act like you’ve never been cut in your life.”

“I never have been cut in my life. That HURTS.”

I scowled, mostly for theatrical effect. “Pray you never lose your power. You’d probably cry like a girl the first time you stubbed your toe. There, I’m done.”

“Chris. I still feel like shit. Why am I still so weak? Keep going.”

“Look, John, Ironheart, you may be impervious to damage, but this poison binds to your blood cells and prevents them from carrying oxygen. I couldn’t remove the poison without removing the blood.” I lifted the pot I’d been coaxing blood into. “You just lost all this. You’re tough, but you still take time to build up blood, and you still get tissue damage if you can’t oxygenate . . . are you even listening to me?”

“Sure. Yeah.” Of course, he wasn’t listening. “But I need to be out there. The cyborg guy, we think he’s going to attack another lab today.”

“The Cyborg Guy? That’s the best you got?”

“He’s new in town. He’s going after military-grade laser weapons. I can’t just lay around.”

He tried to sit up again, and with one finger on his chest, I pushed him down onto his back; this man, who would lift a car like a piece of fruit any other day, dropped by the touch of a fingertip. I kind of liked that. “I’ll handle him.”

He scoffed.”Look . . . I know you’re as fast and as strong as a body can be, but he’s literally a machine. Human ability can’t beat him, and he can electrify his body. You wouldn’t be able to touch him. Even if you could, how would you hurt him? You can’t fuss with people’s insides if they don’t consent.”

“Jonathon . . . Ironheart. Trust me.”

Jessica had been watching, and she frowned, at this. “Christopher, you told us you couldn’t affect someone who was resistant to you. Was that a lie?”

I looked at Jessica, letting my exhaustion show; I was tired of the conversation fast. “That wasn’t a lie, and it’s not how I intend to handle him. It’s none of your business cutie, and John, it’s none of yours, either. You can trust me, or not. But if you don’t give me an address chrome-dome is walking out of that lab with lasers tonight.”

It took convincing. When I left, I think they both half-expected it to be the last time they saw me. At home I worked to support a team; The Good Doctor wasn’t a solo warrior. I looked at the lab, watching it from a distance. I should have an hour or so. It would be long enough. I reached down, touching a blade of grass. The grass hadn’t sufficient awareness to resist me, and immediately I had a sense of the whole plant and the spread of its roots. I initiated processes that just couldn’t be explained by science. Cascades of complex changes, chemically and biologically impossible, flowed from my simple wishes.

The roots of the grass tangled with the next plant, and the next, until the entire field of grass was a single organism. The roots sought deeper, seeking out life. Insects and worms were caught in their grasp, infected by my influence as roots grew into them, tying everything beneath me into a single network of life. I began drawing the grass underground, and gathering biomass from deeper in the earth, spreading out, turning the organic matter turning into a vast underground organ.

In time, I formed a giant underground heart, sheathed in bone, carrying a reservoir of thousands of gallons of organic mush – something like blood. It would leave a void of life that the earth beneath me would take months to recover from.

Time to shift my focus. Bone began to grow, now. Like tree roots, they grew in tendrils, hair-thin at first, infiltrating the tiniest cracks in the building’s foundations. I grew them all through the foundations and the walls, saturating the hidden spaces with bone filaments. I began channeling blood through the bone and into the vents and the crawl spaces. Membranes formed between spurs of bone, rudimentary ears. Nerves spread to connect them to me, letting me listen as blood poured into the building, filling the hidden spaces with mass that I could use.

I heard him first. The whine of a jetpack, then the blue light from his exhaust as he dropped to the ground, and began hacking the electronic lock. His body really was almost entirely metal. How much of him was still flesh? He got in easily, of course. I never intended to keep him out.

Everything seemed quiet. I looked down at the facility, lowering my altitude and landing at the door. I pulled a jack out of my wrist, ripping the casing off the card-reader bare-handed. I plugged myself into the diagnostics jack, and within a few moments, had bypassed security.

I moved through the facility, quietly as a six-foot tall metal cyborg could. I was picking up some odd sub-acoustics. Creaking, dripping. Something was wrong here. But the laser lab wasn’t far. That’s when blood started coming out of the walls.

“Freaking scientists can’t even keep their science in the bottle . . . careless bastards. What kind of creepy B-movie bullcrap is going on in this place?” I hurried toward the stairs. Blood was pooling on the floor, and I saw meat beginning to squeeze out of dome of the ductwork. “Shit. This isn’t fricking funny.”

I pounded up the stairs. Whatever was happening was happening throughout the building. Some spiky formation was creeping inward from the vents, filling the halls. I grabbed one as I passed, glanced at it. Rigid, but porous, marrow in the middle. Bone. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

I kicked through the door of the lab. I didn’t care about alarm anymore. Once I had the lasers I could carve my way out of any corner. The room was a cloud of bone filaments. They’d overgrown the prototypes, bone getting into the cracks and growing – as I watched, one of the prototypes snapped in two, from the pressure of the roots growing from within – like a tree root splitting stone.

I suddenly realized that this wasn’t just weird. I was in a great deal of danger. And it didn’t help when, in the meat that had been growing over every wall, eyes began to open.

I broke, and I ran. This was too much. This was a horror movie or a nightmare. The bone and meat had overgrown every hallway by now, blood an inch thick across the floor. I crashed through it, smashing it, but as it grew thicker and fused, I was having a harder and harder time. I had to ram the growths several times now to make any headway, and I kept slipping in the blood. I was uncomfortably aware that the corridor I’d cleared was closing up behind me, and that amidst the spiky mesh of bone filling the halls, more and more eyes were opening around me. I began screaming as I flailed at the bone, smashing eyes, trying to force my way free.

He had bought himself a few minutes when he thrust his arm into the web of bone I’d built, and detonated a grenade. It tore his arm off, but being what he was, that was probably replaceable. Still, I had him again soon. Spraying the jetpack fuel and igniting it bought him a little time, too, but his electric discharges were almost useless, killing bone without breaking it.

Bony threads worked their way into his chassis, got into the seams of him, and grew into the interior. Over the course of twenty minutes, bone tore his chassis and body apart. Over the next few hours, I drove the monster I’d created to secrete various acids for the various metals he was made of, digesting him. I wasn’t a fan of surprise comebacks.

I gave one last instruction to this grotesque organ I’d created – decay. Everything I had created would begin dying on a cellular level, breaking down into mush and grit.

I opened my cell phone and dialed a number. John – Ironheart – answered on the first ring.

“It’s done. I’m afraid I killed him.”

“Christopher . . . how?”

“Trade secret, I’m afraid.”

“Seriously, you can trust me.”

I knew better, though. Nobody wanted to know the true extent of my abilities, not really. I was accepted, sometimes even revered as a healer, a man who could save your life, and trusted because my power relied on consent. My team at home relied on me for my support, but that could quickly change if they saw the extent of my abilities. What I did was nightmare fuel. It could have come straight out of a horror movie, Resident Evil or something.

“Jon. You trusted me to handle this. Trust me when I say that you don’t want to know.”

Write me the original Star Wars movie story, only you are George R.R. Martin.

Author’s note: I’m not very familiar with the expanded universe or with concepts like grey Jedi, so forgive me if I get some nuances wrong.

Star Wars

ByGeorgeR.R.Lucas

“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”

My mind fogged over. It was hard to think. Only one set of words came easily, struggled to escape, a concept that wanted to take root and grow. “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.”

And it was true. They couldn’t be. I knew something was wrong, but this one concept, this central idea took root in my understanding of the world, fit itself to the core of who I was like a puzzle piece. To remove it would be to leave a hole in my soul.

“He can go about his business.”

This pressure was tied to the first concept, already firmly rooted, and grew. I fought it, and I struggled. My blaster rose, slowly, sweat dripping into the inside of my helmet. The old man in front of me frowned, and intensified his gaze. I could feel my mind being crushed by the growing roots of his influence. “They can . . . go about their business.” Continue reading “Star Wars, by George R. R. Lucas”

Sixteen years ago you caused an accident that left 12 people dead. At first you weren’t able to live with what you had done but now you’re glad it happened, it helped you find your calling. You have become the most notorious serial killer of all time.

It was an accident. Just an accident. After I had lost control, I knocked another car right into a railroad crossing. The train wasn’t carrying coal or chemicals. It was a transit line. Not many people were riding at that hour, but enough. One derailed car hit a sewer access, just an elevated concrete block. It tried to flip over, but a subway car isn’t meant for those kinds of stresses. It tore in half and slammed down, spilling humans across the street. The dead . . . they aren’t bodies. When you read a story, you have such a clear division. There are men and women, and there are corpses. One has hopes and dreams, and the other is meat, a set piece to decorate the landscape of a television series, or a video game.

For a thousand years you’ve been trapped inside of a magical sword. Warriors from every century have wielded you in glory. Now you only grace the battlefields of public parks and camping grounds as a novelty sword some L.A.R.P. enthusiast bought on craigslist.

Author’s note – this is one of those in which I choose not to strictly adhere to the prompt. If you like the prompt as it was originally written, seek the original, and click the title of the thread to see all the top-level comments, all of which should be either stories or poems. There are some good ones for this one.

Mid-Blade Crisis

This is a story of change, my change. A metamorphosis. I don’t speak of the triviality of my form. This story is about my spirit; though my form is a product of my spirit, so perhaps there is no difference.

I had bathed in so much blood across the centuries. The crusades were my peak. I was drunk with power for centuries. Even as rifles became more common, I often drank. When firearms truly came into their prime, times became leaner.

My nature is such that I am shaped by the expectations of those exceptional people who might wield me. I have been a katana, I have been a bastard sword, I have been a stiletto and a claymore. In these modern days, I have even been tools, to my shame. But eventually some exceptional youngster comes along, looking for something to pretend to do battle with, and I am a weapon again.

And always, always I take blood. If not from an enemy – so few people have “the enemy” now – if not from the enemy, I will take it from the wielder. A spirit has to eat, after all, same as any man.

Recently, I was the bayonet of a re-enactor. Believing I was a genuine civil war bayonet, I was one, and thus he was reluctant to try to blunt the edge of an artifact so rare, so pristine. But he would not bring me to battle with an edge. And so he made me impotent, helpless to kill. He made a sheath of semi-flexible clear plastic, thick and bulging around the tip and edge. There was no chance I might accidentally cut through. He was always so careful in maintenance. I could not disrupt his focus, could not call for his blood in a careless mistake. Lacking the strength of blood, I fell back on the intensity of those men’s emotion. It was a weak substitute, meant only to last until I could truly feed again.

And they were passionate. They fought, and they struggled, they tried to win, they worked to overcome. They forged bonds, they formed enmity, comrades, and nemeses. And afterward, the South and the Union got up off the ground, they shooke hands, they talked, they hugged. They did not hate the men who defeated their brothers. Even their defeats bound them more closely to the enemy. Even their enemies were men to them, and these bonds of enmity made them more human, not less.

I have bathed in so much blood. But I am beginning to think that I was not strong. Oh, I was powerful, as were the warriors who bore the burden of feeding my thirst, but was I strong? Were those warriors strong, or only powerful? It took a very long time for me to ask myself what strength truly is. I think it may not be what I thought.

When he died, and his grandchild picked me up, it was the first time someone looking for a play weapon – a ‘boffer’ – truly found what they were looking for. Fifty years ago, he would have found a vicious blade, shaped just right for a young man’s longsword, or an adult’s bastard sword, ready to draw the blood of his companions, or himself in some careless mistake. Today, I am a toy with which to play games. And I surprise myself; I am not ashamed.

I walked into the metal room, and the steel door swung shut behind me. The voice was raw, exhausted, accented, muffled beneath a black bag over his head.

“Who is there?”

In silence, I walked to the single chair as the door locked, and locked, and locked again. My shoes clicked on the floor as I circled him. His shirt was bloodied, torn. The bloodstains were pale pink, evidence that they had tried waterboarding, too. His teeth and nails were unmarred, but if they’d had time to exhaust every avenue, they wouldn’t have called me. Continue reading “Intimate Moments”